Dispatch

The Location Below: What a Pilgrim Did on the Variante Espiritual

· 5 min · Camino Portugués

The post went up on the second of September. A woman was walking the Variante Espiritual out of Pontevedra — the first stage, the one that leaves the Central route and climbs towards Armenteira — and a man on a scooter came up behind her. It was about half past ten in the morning. He stopped, and he touched himself while looking at her. He did not come after her. She wrote that she was fine and very shaken up, which are both true at once and which anyone who has had a morning like that will recognise.

Then she did three things. She reported it to the police. She thanked two kind pilgrims. And she posted the location.

Not the story. The location. The village was Casal de Mendo, a name that means nothing until you are standing in it, which is exactly why she wrote it down — it sits in the first couple of hours out of Pontevedra, on the wooded stretch before the roundabout signposted up to the Monasterio do Poio. Anyone walking that stage the next morning now knew the kilometre. It is a small, unglamorous piece of work, and it is the part worth copying.

Two more threads followed. On the fourteenth, one titled simply Warning for solo women — a hundred and fifty-eight upvotes, eighty-four comments. On the sixteenth, a young woman walking alone wrote that she was tired of the sexual attention from old men on the Camino, of being looked over without discretion, of being passed in deserted places. Two hundred and twelve upvotes, a hundred and thirty comments. Three posts in fifteen days.

It would be easy to read that run of three as a road turning dangerous. It is not what the numbers say. The Pilgrim’s Office had issued 394,185 Compostelas by late August, about 22,300 more than the same date last year, with four months still to run — and the Portugués is the second most walked of all of them. A record year produces a record amount of everything, including this. Nobody publishes a rate for it, and anyone who tells you the road has got worse — or that it has not — is working from the same three posts you are. What is certain is only the denominator: more people are walking this route, and more of them are walking it alone, than at any point on record.

What is new is not the conduct. It is that three women in a fortnight wrote it down with a date on it.

A road does not become safe by nothing happening on it. It becomes safe by what gets said out loud afterwards.

Because the alternative to the public post is not a quieter Camino. It is the same Camino with worse information, where the woman who walks that stage tomorrow morning finds out the way the woman before her did. Reporting it to the police protects the record. Posting the kilometre protects the person behind you. These are different jobs and you need both, and only one of them is in anybody’s guidebook.

So carry the drill. 112 is the emergency number in Spain and in Portugal, the same three digits either side of the Miño. Install AlertCops before you fly — it is the Spanish security forces’ own app, not a private service, with an SOS button that goes straight to police and a Guardián function that shares your location with a trusted contact for a set window. It works across Spain apart from the País Vasco and Cataluña, which means it covers Galicia and the entire northern half of this route. Tell the next hospitalero, who will tell the next one. And write down the kilometre where the pilgrims behind you will read it.

None of that is a special female protocol. It is what the road has always run on. The albergue list taped in a window, the chalk arrow on a wall, the warning about the dog past the river, the note about the fountain that has stopped working: the Camino has never been safe because it was patrolled. It has been workable because the people two hours ahead of you keep telling you what they just found. She used the system correctly. The system happens to be strangers.

The other half of this is not a logistics problem and cannot be solved with an app, and it belongs to the men reading. The thread on the sixteenth is not about crime. It is about being looked over on a path by someone who has decided that a woman walking alone is scenery. The Pilgrim Age has written the interior version of this — about the posture that treats another person as a thing to be obtained, and about the boy who cannot receive what is given to him going looking for a system to get it instead. A Camino is an unusually good place to notice that habit in yourself, because you will pass the same people day after day and there is nowhere to hide the way you look at them. Walk behind, not beside, if you catch yourself matching someone’s pace. It costs nothing and it reads as the courtesy it is.

So walk it, and walk the Variante Espiritual. It is still the best seventy kilometres on this route: Combarro, where sixty hórreos stand on stone legs along the shore and thirty of them face the sea, the long climb to the monastery at Armenteira, and then the Traslatio, the stage where you stop walking and cross the Arousa estuary by boat to Pontecesures. September and October are the months for it. The vinho verde grapes are coming in and the heat is off.

Walk it alone if alone is how you meant to walk it. The woman who posted from Casal de Mendo did not tell anyone to stop walking, and she did not ask for company. She gave out a map reference and carried on. If you want to honour what she did, the move is not to walk more fearfully. It is to be the kind of pilgrim who says the useful thing out loud when it is your turn — and, if you are walking the Francés or anywhere else this autumn and something happens, to remember that the location is the part that helps.

— Pilgrimages

Questions

Is the Camino Portugués safe to walk alone as a woman in 2026?
Broadly yes, and the evidence for that has not changed: the Portugués is 243 kilometres of populated country, the second most walked of all the Caminos, and in a record year — the Pilgrim's Office had issued 394,185 Compostelas by late August 2026, roughly 22,300 more than the same point in 2025. You are rarely far from a village, a bar, or another walker. But as of September 2026 there is a specific, dated report worth knowing about: on 2 September a pilgrim walking the Variante Espiritual out of Pontevedra wrote that a man on a scooter followed her and exposed himself near the village of Casal de Mendo at about half past ten in the morning. She reported it to the police and posted the location publicly. Two further threads about solo women's safety appeared on the main Camino forum on 14 and 16 September. Three posts in a fortnight is a pattern in the conversation, not proof of a dangerous road. Walk it, and carry the reporting drill rather than a change of plans.
What should I actually do if something happens to me on the Camino in Spain?
Three things, in this order. Call 112, which is the emergency number across Spain and Portugal both. Install AlertCops before you go — it is the Spanish security forces' own app, with an SOS button that reports straight to police from your phone and a 'Guardián' function that shares your location with a trusted contact for a set period; it works everywhere in Spain except the País Vasco and Cataluña, so Galicia and the whole of the Portugués north of Tui are covered. Then tell the next hospitalero, and post the location where the pilgrims behind you will read it. The last step is the one people skip, and it is the one that helps strangers. Reporting it to the police protects the record; posting the kilometre protects the person walking that stretch tomorrow morning.
Should I skip the Variante Espiritual because of this?
No. The Spiritual Variant is roughly 70 kilometres in four stages, one of them by boat, leaving the Central route at Pontevedra and running through Combarro and the monastery at Armenteira to Vilanova de Arousa, where the Traslatio crosses the Arousa estuary to Pontecesures. It is the best walking on the Portugués. The first stage, Pontevedra to Armenteira, is about 21.5 kilometres with a climb after Combarro, and the stretch in question is in the first couple of hours, on a wooded section before the roundabout signposted to the Monasterio do Poio. One reported incident on one morning does not close a route that thousands walk each season. Know the stretch, walk it in company if that suits you, and know what to do — which is what the pilgrim who posted it wanted for you.